Narrative

Heroines and heroes, radical climate and vegan activists and others, things are really coming to a head. In the positive sweep of global history, we are reaching a pivotal moment. Either we evolve to the next level, as a species, or we go down in flames (or possibly a mixture, depending on our location). Everything is to play for, and we need appeal only to the highest virtues and traits, deities and questers. Today I appeal to Athena, Ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration and strategy, amongst other things.

I am only a little embarrassedto report that after a meeting with my ‘work coach’ at the government job centre the other day, I am now bound to provide evidence of business sales at my next appointment on 29th April, meaning I have to move my launch date (again!) forward to 22nd April. During that launch week I need to make sales. This means I have to step back from XR afterall. It means I can’t be directly involved in the International Rebellion in London mid-April.

You may think I am involved in some Climate / Extinction denialism, to think like this.Quite the opposite. My personal view is that Extinction Rebellion will achieve great things this April, but not (yet) the stated aim of a national citizens’ assembly to work alongside the government to deal with the ecological crisis. I did want to be directly involved anyhow, but heigh-ho.

You may ask, how can I be a capitalist (a business person, an entrepreneur) when I know that neoliberal capitalism is responsible for the sixth mass extinction event, including climate breakdown, as well as entrenched social injustice within the human species?

For me it’s simple: I want peace. For someone who wants peace, and has studied (a little) the inevitable decline of global capitalism and the inevitable relocalisation of culture, a period of managed decline, including ‘Transition capitalism’ or what I call ‘ecopreneurial Descent economics’ (eDe) is needed to help mitigate the chaos and social unrest that always occurs between civilisational epochs. More on this another time, but essentially what I advocate for is a decade of private enterprise, the main purpose being to further global activism for system change (the end of capitalism), by dismantling large corporations and redistributing wealth. The way this private enterprise is conducted is just as important as the end goal of redistributing profit and using it to break up corporations. By ‘the way it is conducted’ I mean, what the substance of the business is (what is being sold) as well as how the business is resourced, owned, staffed, and directed. The business must play a clear and sustainable role in global system change, and have obsolescence designed into it (a planned disintegration phase as we move into the next post-capitalist stage of global civilisation).

My first product is the Well Gathered workbook -spreadsheets of useful websites for activists. In other words, curated lists. They include cross-referencing and suggestions for how to use the information. The information will always be free to those who can’t afford to pay.

It is absolutely vital that as activists in an over-complex world of competing forms and articles of knowledge, we build up a coherent picture of what is going on in the world, in order to act from a place of reasonable certainty. Ignorance holds us back, and it is only by being aware of the shifting whole, that we allow the whole to evolve to heal. This is a principle of Gestalt Therapy.What we deny (in ourselves, and on Earth) will sabotage our efforts at global transformation.

The serious stuff: if you want a free copy of the first sheet in the Well Gathered workbook, contact me. The first sheet is a curated list of climate science and climate news sites. I would like your views on it. How can I improve on it? If you help me out, you will get a free copy of the final product, and free product updates for life. Email address at the bottom of the post.

In my attempt to keep things light, I’m integrating my love of music into Epic Tomorrows. (Because activism should have a great soundtrack!). I finally interviewed Queen Left the other day. It was a really great interview, and you can listen to it on the Epic Tomorrows Soundcloud channel. Please skip through the first ten minutes of silence and mumbling (whoops!) I haven’t worked out how to edit it yet.

So tell me what you think of Queen Left.

This brings us to my recommended Rebel listening for this week.‘U.N.I.T.Y.’ by Queen Latifah, because Q.L. likes this track as much as I do, and because it’s partly where Q.L. got her name from.

By Queen Latifah and Athena, I strive onwards!

As always, feel free to comment or contact me with your vegan and climate activist dilemmas onepictomorrows@gmail.com. Also email me to get your free spreadsheet of climate science and climate news websites, with some suggestions on how to use the info. (The vegan sites will be coming soon.) I am doing my best to find answers for you. Also feel free to sign up to my posts by email, by clicking the button in the Epic Tomorrows sidebar. Finally, if you would like to order your copy of the Well Gatheredworkbook, let me know. I will be capping early sales at 30 for five quid, so that I can concentrate on engaging with my first customers and getting good feedback / providing extra help and mentoring for you. So contact me to be one of the lucky 30. Thanks.

‘!Hello you lovely activists, you heroines and heroes! Today’s post is dedicated to Medea, the sorceress who was the true power behind Jason of the Argonauts, the woman who enabled him to plough a field with fire-breathing oxen, defeat a band of skeleton warriors and the dragon that protected the golden fleece. In the original myth, Medea was not scorned by Jason, and so did not poison him. And they all lived happily for a while…!

Okay, it’s all about the climate this week folk…It’s been just over two weeks since my last post. I’ve been struggling with my own skeletal adversaries, and don’t even ask me about that slumbering dragon -I’m not ready for that!

I’ve decided to put forward the launch date of Well Gatheredonce again -this time right to the beginning of May. Despite the business advice I’ve had to stick to launch dates and not move them, I think I am justified. The original launch clashed with the International Extinction Rebellion (XR). I’m not about to give up my involvement with XR -it’s a crucial response to global climate and ecological breakdown and besides, gives me ideas on how to be useful to activists, which is what Epic Tomorrows is all about.

I understand the importance of a fixed date for some things, but it’s not like I have thousands of followers who will be affected (yet!). And the lovely follower-friends I do have I know are wise and grounded people who won’t bat an eyelid. As for myself, I’m not letting myself down -I’m giving myself a real chance. A chance to finish properly a product and sing the magical story of it. I reckon this is the beginning of something really special, a way that I can nourish activists in a ongoing, ever-evolving way. I’m coolly excited. 🙂

I was due to interview the political rapper Queen Leftlast night. She was stuck in traffic in her home city of Atlanta, Georgia, USA and I was tired, so we postponed. But having the very human email exchange that we had has only given me more enthusiasm for the upcoming interview. Respecting these postponements, these flows of life…

I’ve been playing some more games with time recently.A few days ago I had a message from my solicitor to say that Devon and Cornwall Counter Terrorism Unit had gotten back in touch with her. I had instructed her to hold fire when they last contacted her, to see how long it would take them to chase it up. She was keeping my written response ready to send. They wanted to talk to me about a blog post I wrote for the Extinction Rebellion blog, where I mentioned that I would probably get myself arrested again in April, non-violently in the streets of London along with many other XR rebels. The CTU are attempting to scare me a little it seems, or make an example of me. But they are only responding to me making an example of myself. 🙂 A message for the police and the CTU (if you are watching me even here on my own blog) and I mean this kindly: We’re going to win chaps, one way or another, so give up now. If you have children and you want their future safety assured, take off your uniforms and join XR. And please do carry on reading to learn something about climate science.

I’m almost done with trawling through climate science websites! Literally and emotionally! I hope I’ve saved you heroines and heroes some time though. After extensive searching over several weeks I’ve dismissed the most deceptive and misleading of so-called ‘climate sceptics’ / deniers’ arguments over ‘hockey stick’ tree-ring proxy data, the related ‘Climategate’ and other controversies. I’ve discovered how massive, fragmented and often profligate the nature of modern knowledge is, and how hard it is for any of us, including us activists, to have an accurate overview of the truth of what is going on in the world in one small subject area at any given time, let alone to try to maintain an overview from week to week as data and conclusions grow and shift.

The area of climate science is no different, despite the urgent imperative that we respond coherently to climate breakdown as a species. In my online search I have also been reminded of how our egotistical tendencies, natural desires for social recognition and a secure knowledge of the universe and our place in it, give rise to bias and an unwillingness to maintain an openness to complex, ever-changing data and the variety of conclusions that can be drawn from them. It takes a certain kind of intellectual rigour and moral courage to be able to continually occupy a place of ‘I’m not really sure’, rather than identifying with a clear position of ‘believer’ or ‘denier’. It’s nice to see initiatives like Berkeley Earth which was set up in 2010 to scientifically deal with the valid concerns of so-called ‘climate sceptics’. Reassuringly for some of us, the first Berkeley report of 2012 concluded that the concerns of the sceptics were ultimately unfounded -though it took a fair bit of rigourous investigation to reach that point.

Without the openness of initiatives like Berkeley, we give so-called ‘climate change deniers’ -or alternatively, anyone with an outlying opinion on climate science at either end of the spectrum- too much power by not engaging with them properly and reasonably, and I might add, with compassion for their insecurity -an insecurity that we all feel.

As I think is implied by The Science of Doom, although it is not always useful to polarise people between anthropogenic climate change ‘believers’ on one side and ‘deniers’ on the other, it is sometimes a convenient and almost unavoidable way to frame the debate. But we must understand that there is a diversity of debate between the extreme positions of claiming to ‘prove’ that climate change is not predominantly human-caused, and claiming to ‘prove’ that humanity will all but have disappeared from the face of the Earth in under five years from now.

The truth is somewhere inbetween. Yes, of course the warming in recent decades is predominantly human in origin. But predicting the future is notoriously difficult. Nevertheless, after my extensive online search of climate science / news sites for the Well Gatheredworkbook I can confidently say that there is a reasonable likelihood of civilisational collapse before the end of the century as a result of climate breakdown, unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions (mainly CO2) to near zero by around 2030 -not 2050 as the IPCC suggests. Ideally we should be looking at 2025. With a war-time effort it is possible. For the sake of my nieces and nephews, it is a no-brainer: the precautionary principle simply must be used here -human civilisation, perhaps even human survival (beyond a few thousand breeding pairs anyway) is at stake.

Okay, so this week’s rebel listening is a clear choice.Keith Flint, prodigy frontman, died just a few days ago. No I’m not going to link to an article on his untimely death. Suffice to say that I’ve had The Prodigyplaying many a time during intensive work periods for Epic Tomorrows.

So feel free to sign up to my posts by email, by clicking the button in the Epic Tomorrows sidebar. And if you would like to order your copy of the Well Gathered workbook, let me know. I will be capping early sales at 30 for six quid each, so that I can concentrate on engaging with my first customers and getting good feedback / providing extra help and mentoring for you. Contact me to be one of the lucky (I reckon!) 30. Cheers ~

Yes, yes, I know. The climate is breaking down. It’s urgent. An emergency. We’ve only got a few years left to ‘fix’ it.

Indeed, we won’t fix it. Weather patterns will become increasingly unstable and unpredictable, and the effects it will soon have on how humans around the world grow food will be devastating, likely causing harvests to fail across entire continents and food prices to sky-rocket. Millions have already suffered due to the amplified instability. We’re facing imminent societal collapse (whatever that means), both around the world and in the UK. All of our lives are soon going to radically change.

None of this is particularly controversial. When a bus is driving with a certain momentum towards a person, it gets clearer and clearer that it will hit the person. After a certain point, it’s inevitable. And that’s where we stand now, with regards to the momentum of climatic change. The bus is about to hit us. Our lives are about to change. It’s not clear whether or not we’ll survive (as a species). Many species have already been run over. Two hundred species each and every day go extinct.

I’ve been with Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the start. I was one of the 15 people in April 2018 who came together and made the collective decision to try to create the conditions that would initiate a rebellion. I was a coordinator of one of the original five working groups, and I’ve been organising with XR day-and-night since then (frugally living off my savings so I don’t have to work, having quit an industry that paid me £1000/week). And I’ve been in RisingUp (the organisation from which XR has emerged) since the first RisingUp action in November 2016. I’m a RisingUp Holding Group member, and a member of the XR Guardianship Team.

And for the sake of transparency: that previous paragraph is all about me ‘pulling rank’ — I’m trying to convince you to listen to what I have to say…

And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.

As Europeans spread their toxicity around the world, they brought torture, genocide, carnage and suffering to the ends of the earth. Their cultural myths justified the horrors, such as the idea that indigenous people were animals (not humans), and therefore God had given us dominion over them. This was used to justify a multi-continent-wide genocide of tens of millions of people. The coming of the scientific era saw this intensify, as the world around us was increasingly seen as ‘dead’ matter — just sitting there waiting for us to exploit it and use it up. We’re now using it up faster than ever.

Euro-Americans violently imposed and taught dangerous delusions that they used to justify the exploitation and reinforced our dominance, while silencing worldviews that differed or challenged them. The UK’s hand in this was enormous, as can be seen by the size of the former British empire, and the dominance of the English language around the world. There is stark evidence that everyday racial bias continues in Britain, now, today. It’s worth naming some of these constructed delusions that have been coded into societies and institutions around the world:

The delusion of white-supremacy centres whiteness and the experience of white people, constructing and perpetuating the myth that white people and their lives are somehow inherently better and more valuable than people of colour.

The delusion of patriarchy centres the male experience, and excludes/hinders female assigned people from public life (reducing them to a possession or object for ownership or consumption). Patriarchy teaches dominating and competitive behaviours, and emphasises the idea that the world is a place of scarcity, separation and powerlessness.

The delusions of Eurocentrism include the notion that Europeans know what is best for the world.

The delusions of hetero-sexism/heteronormativity propagate the idea that heterosexuality is ‘normal’ and that other expressions of sexuality are deviant.

The delusions of class hierarchy uphold the theory that the rich elite are better/smarter/nobler than the rest of us, and make therefore better decisions.

There are other delusions. These delusions have become ingrained in all of us, taught to us from a very young age.

None of these delusions have ended, although some of the arguments that supported them (e.g. phrenology) have been dispelled. They continue to play out through each of us, in our ways of relating, regardless of our identity. The current pride in the history of the British empire, or the idea that the USA is on the side of ‘good’, continues to enable neo-colonialism in 2019, taking the form of palm-oil plantations, resources wars, and the parasitical financial sector, to name but a few. The task of Extinction Rebellion is to dispel these delusions. We need to cure the causes of the infection, not just alleviate the symptoms. To focus on the climate’s breakdown (the symptom) without focusing attention on these toxic delusions (the causes) is a form a denialism. Worse, it’s a racist and sexist form of denialism, that takes away from the necessary focus of the need for all of us to de-colonise our selves.

My ancestors are European, some of whom claimed to ‘own’ people as slaves. There are black people with the name Basden in the Americas, and I have begun to mobilise my (white) family to make contact in order to seek to pay reparations.

However, my own accountability cannot be fully paid through this. The insanity* of the mind of the coloniser continues today. It continues in the extraction of fossil fuels, minerals and water from the earth. It continues in deforestation and industrial agriculture. It continues in a callous culture of consumption, which intensifies each Christmas. It continues in evictions and deportations. It continues in the ways of relating to those around us that perpetuate separation and division.

The result is isolation, pain and suffering. The result can be felt at the individual level — in the endemic levels of loneliness and mental-health illness. It can be felt at the community level — in the theft of land for plunder and profit by largely-European-and-US-based banks and corporations. And it can be felt at the global level — in the polluting of our air and oceans.

So Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. It’s not even about ‘climate justice’**, although that is also important. If we only talk about the climate, we’re missing the deeper problems plaguing our culture. And if we don’t excise the cause of the infection, we can never hope to heal from it.

This article is calling to all of those who are involved in XR who sometimes slip into saying it’s a climate movement. It’s a call to the American rebels who made a banner saying “CLIMATE extinction rebellion”. It’s a call to the XR Media & Messaging teams to never get sloppy with the messaging and ‘reduce’ it to climate issues. It’s a call to the XR community to never say we’re a climate movement. Because we’re not. We’re a Rebellion. And we’re rebelling to highlight and heal from the insanity that is leading to our extinction. Now tell the truth and act like it.

* I use the term ‘insanity’ carefully, with the intention of highlighting the need for healing. Indigenous First Nation people helpfully taught me to see the mindset of the coloniser as a sickness. In no way do I intend to marginalise or discredit the experience of people who have been labelled ‘insane’ by a normative system, nor who identify as being ‘insane’.

** Climate Justice refers to the injustice that those who are affected first and worst by extreme weather events (the people in the poorer countries, the majority of whom live in the Global South) are not likely to be the ones who caused the climate emissions (the people who consume the most, including the pathologically wasteful cultures of Europe and Turtle Island (aka North America), and the rich who live/travel around the world).

!Hello all you heroines and heroes, tragic characters all. We live in tragic times. Tragic times require heroic responses.

The Well Gathered Workbook is coming along. I’ve done plenty of work on the Climate Science & News spreadsheet this week. I’m rating tens of climate science and climate news sites -the most useful ones I’ve denoted ‘Hot!’ and the super-useful ones I’ve denoted ‘On Fire!’ I’ve also labelled which sites I think are the most useful for tweens and teens to start with, and Earth knows we need our youth to take a keen interest in climate science, starting now. The listed ‘On Fire’ sites so far are https://climatecrocks.com/, http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/, https://www.desmogblog.com/, https://skepticalscience.com/, and https://climatesight.org/. This last one is the personal blog of UK-based climate scientist Dr Kaitlin Naughten -an Antarctic specialist who started blogging when she was sixteen. Very inspiring for girls who are into science and want to pursue it further.

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Yesterday, on Thursday 21st February 2019 -although already it feels like a week ago- Devon County Council declared a ‘climate emergency’. However they failed to set a zero carbon target date. A 2030 date was proposed by a Green councillor and was accepted by the left-wing third of the council, but predictably the Tory majority voted against it.The motion for climate emergency was passed with no date ostensibly, but it was after the ramblings of an old Tory who referred to the IPCC 2050 zero carbon target as a reasonable target (which it isn’t, relying as it does on unproven, undeveloped atmospheric carbon capture technologies). I knew that the failure to adopt the 2030 motion was partly due to entrenched livestock farming interests in Devon which would make the necessary land-use changes very difficult.

This decision came after many impassioned speeches from the public gallery, including from friends of mine, urging the council to act on the global emergency. Exeter students spoke, and a young girl spoke, daughter of a friend, telling the adults that they have had their time to get fat off the land, but now they must pay for it.

I sat in the public gallery and listened to the whole debate.This was after sitting through hours of other County Council matters. Outside County Hall it was a great atmosphere of festivities and resistance, on a warm and bright February day. Colourful Extinction Rebellion banners, as well as anti-Brexit banners, abounded.Students and children were everywhere. Some young girls, head high to my waste, proudly proclaimed to my friend that they were members of Extinction Rebellion. They held their signs of Nature and resistance. It was moving.Meanwhile, the cops trained their cameras on me. No surprise there. I joked with an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a while that the police were probably making all kinds of fantastical links between us that didn’t exist.

Earlier I had enjoyed a tense pause as I waited for my friends in Magdalene Street cafe in Exeter-where some but not all of their cakes are vegan.

Inside the public gallery it was stifling. I removed my coat and my funereal shirt underneath focused my attention on the action that could be immanent.I fingered the personal attack alarm in my pocket nervously, and pinned on my XR patch, following the lead of my buddy next to me. If the council voted for 2050 we were to jump over the barrier separating the public gallery from the floor, and storm to the front of the building, locking on to each other with arms and legs.

It didn’t happen. Some of us were deflated, but we had stuck to our plan of no action for no zero carbon date.

After huddling round with the others in a circle on the grass outside, the debrief and the grief, the anger and resolve,I turned on my heels and walked back to the bus-stop a little darker, a little more determined, a little more free than before.

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Today’s rebel music track (for the tragically heroic) isPut The Message In The Box by World Party. They would have changed the lyrics to ‘Put the box onto the bike…’ had they known…

As always, feel free to comment or contact me with your vegan and climate activist dilemmas on epictomorrows@gmail.com. I will do my best to find the answers for you. Also feel free to sign up to my posts by email, by clicking the button in the Epic Tomorrows sidebar. Finally, if you would like to order your copy of the Well Gathered Workbook, let me know. I will be capping early sales at 30 for five quid, so that I can concentrate on engaging with my first customers and getting good feedback / providing extra help and mentoring for you. So contact me to be one of the lucky 30. Thanks.

!Heroines. Heroes. Activists. Are you having a legendary time?

Forget about Valentine’s Day -we have work to do!

I’m starting to write this post with a burning in my writing hand. This can only be a good sign. The real reason for it is the young stinging nettles I picked from the hedgerow earlier to break my half day fast. (Come on vegans, learn how to forage in the coming climate chaos!!!) In my mythic imagination though, I can fantasise that the gods have instilled this burning in my being to bring out a communicator of heroic proportions. Let me be Metis, the Titaness of wise counsel!

Ah, how I love the play of synchronicity through my everyday life! As I search for an image of the goddess Metis online, a different meaning of the word Metis appears. The Metis Nation of Western Canada are a Nation of mixed indigenous and Euro-American ancestry. Their symbol, the featured image for this post, reminds me of both the mathematical symbol for infinity, and a super-heroine’s mask.

The Metis language ‘Michif’ is a mix of Cree and French. This brings me to another synchronicity. About a week ago I received a friend request on Facebook from ‘Daphnee’, a French-Canadian who is the co-ordinator for XR (Extinction Rebellion) Prince Edward Island in the northeast of Canada. Here they are.We started chatting online, resulting in agreeing to have a videocall (we haven’t yet) and Daphnee provisionally agreeing to be another editor on XR Blog.I founded XR Blog for Extinction Rebellion and am now a co-editor on the blog with an increasingly international team.

I started messaging Daphnee from an off-grid wooden cabin in the middle of a young woodland in mid-Devon, where I go sometimes to take a break from modern technology (so it didn’t quite work this time!) and do some nourishing physical work. Worried as I am about the food and energy security of my future, it’s nice to know I can still split wood with wedges and a sledgehammer. During my couple of days in the woods I received a vision related to Daphnee, which I haven’t told her all about yet. I’ll let you know next time. Suffice to say, I am not a superstitious kind of person, but when I occasionally receive these visions I take them very seriously.

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Anyway, I suppose you’re looking for news on how it’s going with developing my Earth-saving heroic informational product, designed with vital (but perhaps slightly impatient) vegan and climate heroines (and heroes) like you in mind??? Well, I can tell you that the Well Gathered Workbook is progressing nicely thank you!

In the last couple of weeks I have actually got round to starting the product building (yes, I know, it’s a bit late after all the fuss I’ve been making). I am starting with a spreadsheet within the Well Gathered Workbook which focuses on online climate science resources. I have been finding in my own exploration of these complex resources that, in my opinion, guidance for activists is definitely needed. I came across this site, which is a great resource (and I will be listing it), and yet, some of the links are out of date (possibly because the sites no longer exist) and there is not enough assessment of quality of the sites. In the Well Gathered Workbook climate science sheet I will be assessing quality of sites, including my ‘best picks’ from the sites listed on the site linked to above.

I’m also thrilled that two people got in touch to reserve their copies of the Well Gathered Workbook (okay, so one of them is a friend!).

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In other activism related news (from my life!), I got back from a therapeutic day out the other day on a ‘Play Day’ (see Christie Animas’ amazing ‘Fooling’ here) to find a hand-written note pushed through my letterbox. For the second time in a few months, the Counter Terrorism Unit of Devon and Cornwall police wanted to talk to me to ‘discuss my interest in environmentalism.’ Yeah right.

I was unsettled, but not too much so. I contacted the excellent people of XR Exeter and they offered support. The next day I also phoned Green and Blacks, who offer advice for activists and free services from lawyers affiliated with them. Soon enough I had an email written for me by Kelly’s solicitors in Brighton addressed to Devon and Cornwall CTU, warning them off. The great result, which I was cc-ed into, is that for the time being I will be left alone. The attention was due to the action I related in this post.

If you are a hardcore front-line non-violent arrestable activist, I encourage you to sit through the fear induced by police visits like the ones I have received. Urgent climate and ecological breakdown demand that we be brave and sit through the scare tactics. I’m a very sensitive guy, and I’ve suffered from my fair share of mental health difficulties, but I can assure you that resilience in the face of the cops, like anything, gets easier over time.

However, this resilience will only be developed if you have robust self-care practices in place in your life.For myself, living alone in a flat and physically isolated for most of the time, these practices are particularly important to keep up. So I walk in Nature, I have enough phone-calls with friends, especially empathic activist friends, and I connect with family. I can’t tell you how nourished I felt the other day when I visited my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew. My bro-in-law is an excellent chef and cooked some amazing vegan meals -I mean seriously mouth-watering, from this book.Okay, so I know we don’t all have a great biological family. So which friendships can you cultivate to the point that they feel like family?

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So I really feel like I am starting to gather well. ‘Gathering well’ is a mission that all modern people are called to upon to do, especially activists. And sometimes it takes a fair amount of heroism. Sitting through the scary stuff. You and I are increasingly called upon to gather our influences, our families, the practices that we know are good for us and the information that we know could be useful to us. Most of all we need to gather our courage and strength, so that we may begin to face the bumpy (to say the very least) transition to post-carbon, post-globalised humanity, on a soon-to-be vastly warmer world which in the not-too-unlikely worst case may reduce our population to a few thousand breeding pairs.

My role for Epic Tomorrows is to save you time (yes I know you’re busy heroically fighting the multi-headed monsters of the carbon industry and the industrial meat industry). Whether it’s gathering insight from my experiences as a front-line arrestable activist, or collecting and recording the in-depth insights I’m gaining from developing as a highly discerning surfer of the net, I trust that I will start to save you a little time. Obviously, the Well Gathered Workbook is my way of saving you time whilst (just beginning) making a living for myself.

By the way, for those of you who were expecting the Queen Left interview on 14th of February, Queen somehow didn’t get some emails of mine, so we are postponing the interview for a few weeks now. (Listen to her on the Epic Tomorrows frontpage here).

So with my fingers still pleasantly burning from the nettles, I want to tell you to forget about Eros, that silly love-struck boy.Think of Metis the wise counsellor, gatherer of wisdom, who preceded Zeus chronologically in the Greek pantheon. Metis who caused Athena, fully armoured, to be born from Zeus’ forehead.

Heroines and heroes, go forth!

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As always, feel free to comment or contact me with your vegan and climate activist dilemmas on epictomorrows@gmail.com. I will do my best to find the answers for you. Also feel free to sign up to my posts by email, by clicking the button in the Epic Tomorrows sidebar. Finally, if you would like to order your copy of the Well Gathered Workbook, let me know. I will be capping early sales at 30 for five quid each, so that I can concentrate on engaging with my first customers and getting good feedback / providing extra help and mentoring to them. So contact me to be one of the lucky 30. Thanks.

I haven’t got much to offer you this week. I’m sorry. I don’t see the point when I’m behind on building my product (which I really do hope will help you) and behind on building my email list. I thought last week’s post was one of my best yet but it was hardly read. I have an idea why, a complex reasoning based on the fact that I have started a cut-up novel with this same WordPress account, which because of its nature may appear to WordPress to be a cynical attempt to maximise my website traffic. I know WordPress can penalise in such instances. So last week’s ?You Gather? post may have been bumped down the WP Reader. Here’s the offending creative work in question: The Rebel Sense of Kathy ‘Sugar’ Celeste.

Meanwhile, let me break it to you brutally. ‘Going vegan’ will not save the planet (even if everyone did it tomorrow). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be vegan (or for some of us, realistically, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t eat less meat). Nor will reducing CO2 emissions to zero by 2050 (the standard conservative narrative of what we need to do to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown). Reducing emissions to zero by 2025 might however, avert catastrophe. But only if in concert with dealing with the wider ecological crisis of the sixth mass extinction event on Earth, including the loss of biodiversity and the loss of ecosystem services vital for human life, including soil fertility.

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My name is Matthew, author of !Epic Tomorrows. Click here to help me rebel against the evil Hydrocarbon Twins, Corporate Ogres, the Devil of Neoliberal Economics Himself, and the Same Old Story into which they are written…